


Questions of Science and Progress

by IdrisEleven



Series: Da Vinci's Ficlets [3]
Category: Da Vinci's Demons
Genre: Gen, Implied relationships are not necessarily happening here, Not Canon Compliant, Photo prompt, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-06 00:17:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6729364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IdrisEleven/pseuds/IdrisEleven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Riario has seen the consequences of Leonardo's latest experiments, and he holds Lucrezia and Zoroaster responsible for the terrible results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Questions of Science and Progress

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a Tumblr photo prompt, this is an alternate take on the DVD universe, so it is not strictly canon compliant. More of a remix than an AU, really.
> 
> Prompt is here:
> 
> <http://romibsauce.tumblr.com/post/143214593015/shall-we-write-for-fritson-friday-it-is-once>

On the _Basilisk_ , at anchor in Pisa.

He rarely allowed himself the luxury of anger, preferring to keep it tightly reined in. He was very proud of his self-control. He had also seen how his _Holy Father_ lost his temper and how it caused him to act irrationally, to lose his advantage. No, Riario did not indulge his emotions.

Which meant that occasionally, something happened that outraged him to such an extent, that breached even the walls he had put up within himself, and his fury came out like a tsunami, destroying anything in its path, overwhelming in its power.

Lucrezia stood no chance. Once he recognized her presence in the cabin, he crossed the space, as swift as thought. He flung her back onto his desk and loomed over her, the dagger already in his fingers, hovering only a fraction of an inch above her eye. With his left hand, he pried her eyelids apart, denying her any illusion of safety from his vengeance.

“Do you realize what you have done? You and that mongrel lover of yours?” His voice was low, but in no way controlled. It crawled out of his throat as though it were spiked with shards of glass, leaving a bloody mess of his vocal cords and would assault the listener as well. He was shaking violently, yet as if he were built on a gyroscope, the blade over Lucrezia’s lying eyeball was steady.

Lucrezia was a mess, sobbing and terrified, unable to form complete sentences. “Please, no . . .he’s not. . .please, don’t.” The point of the blade was so close it was impossible for her to focus, to really see it. Nor could she see Riario’s face. Her tears ran as she gasped for breath.

“You have blinded the man with the greatest mind in Italy,” he growled. “The genius that I have worked assiduously to bring to Rome’s aid; the only military strategist capable of understanding the weapons the Turks have amassed on our shores, and _you have rendered him useless!_ ”

Lucrezia did not dare to move, she knew that blade, even if she could not focus on it. She knew the sharpness of the point, even if it was just a shadow— _too close, the eye cannot focus_ —she could feel it hovering. Riario’s weight pinned her to the surface of the desk, crushing her ribs. Her fear was enormous, she was babbling in her attempts to make herself heard, to get him to stand back, to save her own eyesight.

“No, no, we didn’t. . .I didn’t. . .cousin, please!” She had no idea what she was saying, she didn’t know how to make him listen, she couldn’t find the words to explain herself. “He asked us to do it!”

Suddenly, his weight was off her body, and she could breathe. His fingers were no longer holding her eyelids open, and that deadly shadow had disappeared from her vision. She took a huge shuddering breath and closed her eyes, grateful for the release.

Riario was across the room, hatred in every line of his face. The scar that ran down his left cheek reddened. “ _You lie._ You and that mongrel, that bastard son of a Tuscan whore, you have destroyed Leonardo da Vinci.” He ran a shaking hand beneath his lips. “I saw him— _I saw him_. He was wearing spectacles, unable to walk unaided. He had that young boy, Machiavelli, with him, leading him by the hand!”

Slowly, Lucrezia stood up and smoothed down her dress, trying to restore a little order to her appearance, since she had no such order to her mind. There was a lurch, and she stumbled before looking up at her cousin in a panic. He smiled at her, mirthlessly. She had literally never been so frightened of him before in her life.

“We sail for Otranto, and pray God we get there in time to fight the Turks. Not that you will make it that far.” Lucrezia noticed that his voice was less broken, less violent than before, but she took no comfort from that. He was as deadly when cold and controlled as he was while shaking with fury.

She was right to doubt him; he gestured at a guard, and the door opened to admit another guard leading Zoroaster, bruised and in chains. She stood stock still, her body in shock.

“What?” Riario was not actually laughing, but there was a sarcastic tone that seemed to imply humor. “You are not flying into his arms, lovers reunited after long separation?” Lucrezia glared at him, even though she knew any defiance was dangerous with him.

Zo was shoved into the cabin, and unable to stop himself, landed at Lucrezia’s feet. She recoiled involuntarily—he looked unlike himself. He was not Leo.

“Fucking hell,” he spat at the floor. “Missing a woman so much already you’d do anything to put your hands on me?” This was directed at the guards, obviously, he hadn’t seen who was in the room—possibly the darkness of the cabin was impenetrable after the brightness outside.

“Zo,” Lucrezia whispered. “Be careful.”

The figure at her feet startled, and looked blindly in the direction of her voice. “Lucrezia?”

She bit her lip, darting glances between the battered man at her feet, and the furious man across the table. “Yes, Zo, I am here. So is _my cousin_.”

The motion of the ship made it especially difficult for him to find his balance, with the heavy shackles on his wrists and ankles, so it took several agonizing moments for him to rise to his feet. Once upright, he peered around, taking in the map on the table, Lucrezia’s disheveled state, and the shadow of a man in the dark corner of the cabin.

“Fucking hell,” he said again. “It’s you, you serpent?”

Riario took a step forward, and the light slanted across his face. “Cur.”

Zo blinked, opened his mouth, then shut it. It was possibly the smartest thing he had done in months. Instead, he looked at Lucrezia, his eyebrows raised in question.

“He knows about Leo,” she said quietly. “At least, he thinks he does. He saw the protective glasses and he thinks Leo is blind. He thinks we blinded him.”

The groan seemed to come out of the very depths of Zoroaster’s soul. “I knew it, _I knew it!_ ” He lifted his hands as if to smack his own forehead, but the clanking of the iron chains reminded him that he could do real harm with the gesture. “I _told_ Leo this was going to be a disaster, and it is.” He spun on the ball of his foot to confront Riario. “It was an _invention_ , it was a new technique. Bollocks, the idiot _taught_ us to do it!”

Riario remained impassive, unresponsive. Zo looked over his shoulder at Lucrezia—she knew him, shouldn’t she know how to explain this to him? Lucrezia shook her head slightly, her right eye still red and weeping from the violence Riario had threatened it earlier.

Zo turned back to the man in black, trying to look entirely trustworthy. This consisted of him pasting on a smile and opening his eyes as wide as possible. Riario was visibly unmoved.

“It was Leo’s idea; hell, it was Leo’s attempt to save his sight.” Zo sighed, and scratched his nose. “He was noticing that he couldn’t see as well as he used to, okay? He’s all about sight, about what he can observe. And he noticed that he couldn’t see things at a distance as well as he used to. It was the birds, you know.”

Riario didn’t seem to be listening, but at least he hadn’t told the guards to kick him or anything, so Zo took that as a victory, and kept going. “He watches birds—he goes down to the market, and he buys all the caged birds. He has me and Nico open the cages, and he watches them fly, and then he draws things in his notebooks. Well, he was noticing that he couldn’t actually see clearly enough to draw—he couldn’t see how the birds were flying.”

Riario sniffed. It was a small sound, conveying his utter skepticism of Zoroaster’s report. It made Zo angry, so he became more vehement. “Fuck you, your Countness. You don’t know how many pig’s eyes he made me practice on, okay? He had been studying something—light and eyeballs and I don’t know what all, but he had pages and pages of drawings of eyes and eyeballs, okay? I had to go around to all the butchers on the Ponte Vecchio and ask for the eyes of all the pigs and cows. They started _charging_ me for the fucking things, like anybody else wanted them. But they said they would throw them into the Arno, and if I wanted them, I would have to pay for them.”

Lucrezia kept her head down, but she dared a sideways glance at her cousin’s face. He still looked unutterably bored, but he hadn’t ordered the guards to do anything yet, so maybe there was hope. Zo was warming up to his story—the eternal story, the story he lived, about how utterly ridiculous Leo’s demands were, and how Zo managed to meet them every time.

“As bad as that was, then he wanted _human_ eyeballs, and those aren’t easy to find, no way. I told him that it was hard, and do you know what he said? He said ‘Federico Montefeltro might manage to be a successful _condottiero_ with only one eye, but I cannot work with imperfect eyesight.’” He sighed. “So I found him some human eyeballs as well.

“He started with a collection of daggers, but then he started designing different blades, thinner ones, sharper. In the end, he drew a picture of his own eye, and he handed me one of his new blades. ‘Cut the lines exactly as they are on this drawing. He said. As if I had an artist’s training! In the end, he did a _cartoon_ , laying out the shape of his eye, and the lines I was supposed to use these new blades on.”

Zo took a moment, rubbed his sweaty palms against the seat of his pants, for all the good it did him.

“He made Lucrezia come to help hold him down, or distract him. I don’t know. I was trying to line up this miniature _cartoon_ with his actual eye, and draw the lines he wanted.”

Riario made a sound, an ominous sound, a growl mixed with pain, and the guards stepped forward. Zo realized he had run out of time, so he spoke as quickly as possible. “Leo asked me to do it, he wanted to be able to see again, he was afraid of losing his sight, the glasses are to protect his eyes while they heal, _he said it would heal!_ ”

It was too late. The guards had their orders. One of them grabbed Zo by the elbow and manhandled him out of the cabin. The other grabbed Lucrezia. She looked at her cousin, pleading wordlessly.

“I should, by rights, do to you what you have done to Leonardo da Vinci,” he rasped. He lifted his chin, hiding his eyes in shadow, but not before Lucrezia had seen the hint of tears. “I should drive spikes into your eyes and leave the pair of you to try to survive.” He swallowed, a pathetic sound in the dark cabin. “But we are at war, and there is no time for poetic justice. So you will die.”

Lucrezia made an involuntary sound of protest, and Riario heard it. “We are all doomed, Lucrezia. We will all die. You will die sooner, but no less surely than the rest of us, who are unlikely to return from our fight with the Turks. It may even be a mercy.” That mirthless smile returned, the only part of him that she could see in the uncertain light. “Goodbye, Lucrezia. You are advised to attend to the state of your soul.”

It was still daylight when the crew of the _Basilisk_ gathered on deck. A long plank had been extended from amidships, weighted down with a barrel. Riario had ordered that the two of them be chained together; it seemed to amuse him to pervert a lover’s embrace this way. So Lucrezia and Zoroaster stood together at the end of the plank, with nothing but turbulent sea below, black as ink.

Zoroaster refused to look at their executioner—instead he gazed out as though he could spot a rescue vessel on the horizon. Lucrezia glared at her kinsman, anger mingled with supplication. He was—typically!—unmoved.

“Perhaps you will find forgiveness from God,” he intoned. “You will not find it from me.” He slipped on his own smoked spectacles. “May God have mercy on your souls, as you failed to have mercy on da Vinci.” And with that, he stepped off the plank, and they dropped into the water.

 

 


End file.
